The North Pacific Fishery Management Council during their June meeting in Kodiak decided to proceed with an interim moratorium to stop new entrants into the halibut charter fishery.

The plan was recommended by the Charter Halibut Stakeholder Committee as an initial step toward a permanent solution to the allocation tug of war between the commercial halibut fishery and the charterboat fishery.

“The fishery would be locked into place based on the control date of Dec. 9, 2005,” said Sport Fish special assistant and project coordinator for the Alaska Department of Fish and Game Doug Vincent-Lang. “Anybody who entered the fishery after that wouldn’t be guaranteed a moratorium permit.”

He said there could be some well-defined exceptions such as for the military or hardship cases.

In December 2005, the council considered whether to proceed with bringing the charterboat fishery under the individual fishing quota (IFQ) program.

Vincent-Lang said Alaska Department of Fish and Game commissioner McKie Campbell believed although IFQs for the charterboat fleet had some merit worth consideration, there were other models that should also be considered.

In December 2005, the council repealed their previous action to bring the charterboat fishery under the IFQ program. They charged the stakeholder committee to study the issue and offer recommendations.

“Kodiak was in favor of a temporary moratorium while a final solution was reached,” said charterboat operator and stakeholder committee member Chaco Pearman. “In other words, if you continue to allow growth right now, we’re going to reach the guideline harvest level (GHL) more quickly.

“We’re not against new operators in Kodiak. We just want to get control of the situation until we implement a plan and we have our preferred plan,” he said.

Kodiak’s preferred alternative is a plan formulated by the Kodiak Association of Charterboat Operators (KACO). The council voted to move forward with analysis of some of the elements of that plan toward a long-term solution in the June meeting.

“I think the KACO plan is one of the better plans,” said charterboat operator Michael Ensley. “I think the key is not to lump Kodiak in with the other communities in Area 3C. We want to sub-divide Area 3C and each area will have their own GHL.”

The first sign of allocation issues between the commercial and charter sectors was 10 years ago, Vincent-Lang said, but the first time the charter fleet went over their quota was in 2004. In Area 3A, they went one-half of 1 percent over their GHL. That created an outcry by commercial fishermen because the overage had the potential to erode the commercial GHL.

Kodiak lands 6 percent of the GHL in Area 3A. Prince William Sound and Cook Inlet land the rest of it, Pearman said.

“Kodiak is not the problem,” he said. “Kodiak’s tourism is very slow developing simply because we don’t have a train, a bus or a road coming here.

“We don’t get a lot of walk-up traffic. Ours is destination marketing, where all these other places can fill their boats up in a day with walk-up traffic.”

Now, new charter operators can charter for salmon and halibut. It could take up to three years for the moratorium to be implemented.

“When they implement the moratorium, only the people that qualified back in December will be allowed to charter fish for halibut. Everybody else can still charter for salmon,” Pearman said.

From now, the council will start an analysis of the moratorium. It could be in place by 2009.

“I think a moratorium is a good way to lock in entry into that fishery while we’re working on a long-term solution,” Vincent-Lang said. “It’s something that will provide some stability while we’re working toward a long-term solution between the allocations of the sectors.”

The KACO plan for Areas 3A and 2C is to create a charter halibut stamp and create a nonprofit entity similar to the Kodiak Regional Aquaculture Association, Pearman said.

Revenues from the stamp would go to the nonprofit that would buy commercial IFQs and convert it to GHL.

“When we did the math, the stamp program alone would have generated enough money to grow the GHL by 1.8 percent,” Pearman said. “If you did that times 10 years, that’s 18 percent. That’s faster than the industry will probably grow, even area-wide.”

The plan would make it so that any portion of the charter quota not caught that year could be leased back to the commercial sector and the revenues from the leases used to buy IFQ shares in that area along with any by-catch percentage allocated to them, and converted into charter quota.

“It would be a compensated transfer of allocation from commercial to sport,” Pearman said.

However, the council has the final say on the particulars of a long-term solution for the allocation imbroglio.

“You have to realize that on that stakeholder committee everybody has an agenda,” Pearman said. “There are charterboat operators in different areas that want IFQs, just as there are some that are against IFQs and against limited entry.”

Mirror writer Deanna Cooper may be reached via e-mail at dcooper@kodiakdailymirror.com.